Featured Courses

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Storytelling for Change is a 6 module course that will teach you storytelling techniques for how to be a better public speaker and connect with your audience whether you’re in a meeting with one person or in a presentation to hundreds of people. Acumen and The Ariel Group have created a hands-on course…

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​​Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design is a seven-week curriculum that will introduce you to the concepts of human-centered design and how this approach can be used to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change. This course has been created to reach those…

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Making Sense of Social Impact: Acumen’s Building Blocks for Impact Analysis What does social impact mean? How does Acumen assess social impact when considering potential investments? How can you apply the same concepts elsewhere? One of the most common questions we get is how we measure our…

Free Online Courses

We created +Acumen to give people a meaningful way to ‘Add Acumen’ to their lives, and our online courses are a new way to do just that. With 7+ years of experience running our flagship Acumen Global Fellows Program, we saw an opportunity to use online tools to scale the impact of our traditional leadership development programs to equip more emerging leaders with the tools, knowledge, and networks to change the way the world tackles poverty. At Acumen, leadership begins with moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be. Combined with operational skills and financial skills, our courses aim to equip emerging change leaders with the tools to change the way the world tackles poverty and build a world based on dignity.

Acumen’s Leadership Model

Each of our +Acumen courses fits under one of the three areas of Acumen’s Leadership Model.

We are constantly iterating our existing courses and designing new courses, so check back for updates or sign-up to our newsletter to be notified about new courses.

How Our Courses Work

The Best of Online & Offline Learning

Our courses blend the best of online and offline learning by asking that you form a group to meet with to discuss course content weekly. We highly recommend you register with a group of your friends or colleagues to tackle challenges and learn together. If you’re registering on your own, instructions on how to find and form a group will be provided at the beginning of each course. We offer a Statement of Accomplishment for students who complete the requirements for each course. Many participants invest in building their leadership skills through multiple +Acumen courses. Involvement in +Acumen is taken into account for all those looking to get further involved in Acumen’s work investing in companies, leaders and ideas.

Community Stories

St. Louise, Haiti and New York, US | "Human Centered Design for Social Innovation"

The team included Melior Joseph, a law student studying in St. Louise, Haiti and Ellen Feig, an assistant professor of English from Yonkers, New York. Both individuals signed up for the course on their own. Neither could imagine how the course would unfold…

After participating in the course, we made a deliberate decision to abandon our old presentation style and to fill our presentation with the stories of our experiences and lessons learned, while intertwining the key messages and metrics into the flow of the presentation. The result?

Everlyn lived in Kibera, which was far from her new workplace, so she travelled far each morning to arrive for the morning shift. She had a chair, but it was broken and only had three legs, so she couldn’t sit comfortably…

I joined this course thinking I already understood the framework for measuring social impact, but the course materials and the discussions with my course group really challenged my thinking. These examples pushed my group to think more critically about quantifying the ways our work in the field…

Connect With Us

We created +Acumen to give people a meaningful way to "add Acumen" to their lives. Take what you learn at +Acumen and apply it in your own way. Innovation could come from anyone and we believe the world truly needs you to lead.